Prof Paul Murdin | |
|---|---|
 Paul Murdin andRoger Davies, NAM (2012) | |
| 2nd President of the European Astronomical Society | |
| In office 21 August 1993 – 5 July 1997 | |
| Preceded by | Lodewijk Woltjer |
| Succeeded by | Jean-Paul Zahn [fr] |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1942-01-05)5 January 1942 (age 83) |
| Citizenship | British |
| Spouse | Lesley Murdin |
| Children | 3 |
| Alma mater |
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Paul Geoffrey MurdinOBE FRAS (born 5 January 1942) is a Britishastronomer. He identified the first clear candidate for ablack hole,Cygnus X-1, with his colleagueLouise Webster.
He studied Mathematics and Physics at the universities ofOxford andRochester. In 1962, he took an eight-week summer residential course supporting researchers at theRoyal Greenwich Observatory inHerstmonceux and at the end was offered a post by theAstronomer Royal,Richard Woolley. He left to study a PhD at Rochester and returned to the RGO in 1970 as a research fellow. During his three-year contract there, he wondered what he could contribute to find out about the provenance of powerful cosmicx-ray sources that had recently been detected, particularly Cygnus X-1.
After he had made unsuccessful searches for light variations and unusual spectra among the hundreds of stars within the area of positional uncertainty of the X-ray source, a radio star was found that was coincident with a star HDE226868. He decided, with the AustralianLouise Webster, to investigate whether the star was abinary star, possibly with one of the pair being the X-ray source as well as a radio source, but not being visible. They measured theDoppler shift to find that HDE226868 was a binary star with an orbit of 5.6 days orbiting an invisible partner, presumably the source of the X-rays, and which they calculated to be certainly more than 2.5 and probably more than six solar masses. Such a star cannot be a white dwarf or neutron star and they assumed this body to be a black hole.
With Louise Webster, he submitted a paper with "modest" language toNature, only mentioning the term “black hole” in the final sentence.[1] Woolley was quite conservative in his views on astronomy, regarding black holes as "fanciful" (also famously dismissing worthwhile space exploration as "utter bilge"). AstronomerCharles Thomas Bolton then published a paper with a similar conclusion and more astronomers followed suit. The discovery helped Murdin to secure his future employment.[2][3]
He and Webster were amongst the first staff astronomers at theAnglo-Australian Telescope and he continued in his vein of discovery using similar techniques. He returned to the Royal Greenwich Observatory and worked on developing the UK-Netherlands observatory atLa Palma, which became theIsaac Newton Group of Telescopes. He was its first head of operations until 1987. He was the director of theRoyal Observatory, Edinburgh from 1991–93. Then he joined theParticle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, planning and developing the UK's space research policy. He was President of theEuropean Astronomical Society and Treasurer of theRoyal Astronomical Society (to which he'd first been elected as a Junior Member at the age of 17 in 1959, moving to Fellow in April 1963), during which time membership increased, its public outreach programme was established and its journal became the most prominent worldwide. He presided over or chaired various committees of theInternational Astronomical Union (IAU).[4][5][6]
He has authored and edited academic and popular books on astronomy and has written for many journals and newspapers, and well as having appeared regularly on television and radio programmes. In 2023 he was a guest on theBBC Radio 4 programmeThe Life Scientific.[7] Now retired and living in Cambridge, he is a visiting professor atLiverpool John Moores University, Senior Fellow Emeritus at theInstitute of Astronomy, Cambridge and Senior Member at Wolfson College.[4][8]
